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> Retroviruses include HIV and are the most beautiful viruses of all. I honestly do not know what you mean by this. Can you please elaborate?

• globular-toast 7y ago
  It's hard to appreciate without first understanding how our genetics work. That is, the mechanisms that are responsible for replicating our genomes and turning our genes into proteins. Viruses are an inevitability because they exploit vulnerabilities in those mechanisms. Viruses are not alive. Instead a virus causes "live" modifications to a living organism which causes it to simply reproduce more of the virus. When you have a virus you are essentially one with the virus; a modified organism. Retroviruses go one step further by permanently making that modification. Now you are forever modified with the extra functionality of producing more of that virus. But the really beautiful thing is how minimal these viruses are. If you've played code golf you'll appreciate it. In the smaller RNA viruses like influenza and HIV, each virion carries around exactly what it needs to make those modifications and not much more. They consist of proteins which cause our cells to accept them as well as the genome which causes our cells to make more of those proteins. They also cause our cells to reproduce the genome itself too. Eventually the cells become full of virus stuff and somehow the viruses assemble themselves back into virion, the cell dies and releases the new virions. The HIV genome is incredibly compact. It's the closest thing to design I've ever seen in biology. It packs more information into its genome than would normally be possible by utilising overlapping genes on the forward and reverse strand. It's quite remarkable just how clever, minimal and perfect it is.